


You Have Torn It All Apart

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gallifrey, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Episode: s12e01-02 Spyfall, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-19
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27700676
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: The Doctor walks through the ruins of Gallifrey, and tries to find a grain of hope.
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor & The Master (Dhawan)
Kudos: 11





	You Have Torn It All Apart

It’s hard to know what to feel.

As the Doctor leans in the doorway of the TARDIS, watching the ruins of Gallifrey cast a haze of grey smoke into the ochre air, it’s impossible for her to discern what she thinks about its final destruction.

The Master’s message is still ringing in her ears, and she takes a tentative step out of the TARDIS, feeling the soft give of the ashes of her planet beneath her feet. She shoves her hands deep into her pockets and starts to walk, heading down the gentle slope of the foothills and towards the Citadel’s shattered remains, the glass bubble that had once been the pride of her people now shattered and ugly, the jagged remains piercing up into the burnt amber sky.

It had always been inevitable, she supposes. The Time Lords had taken such abject pleasure in fashioning the Master into a weapon; they must have known that at some point the weapon they had crafted with such callous precision had the potential to turn on them. They had implanted the sound of a Time Lord heartbeat into his head as a child and she’d been forced to watch as her friend had descended into insanity, driven mad from the inside out by a noise that no one else had ever been able to hear, and which he had been convinced was a symptom of the deterioration of his grasp on reality.

To learn, many centuries too late, that it had never been a figment of his imagination had brought him catharsis, yes, but also rage; she still remembers his self-sacrifice at the Naismith Mansion as his fury and hatred had been turned on the people who had deliberately corrupted him; had taken a child and manipulated him at the price of his sanity. The people – his own people, and hers – who had taken a child and harmed him for the own ends; had convinced him that he was mad and exiled him in the hope that he would reach the same conclusion; had driven him away and driven him to commit unspeakable acts in the hope that perhaps with enough killing there might come silence; an end to the incessant drumbeat.

The Doctor wonders what it must have been like for Missy, to find herself free for the first time in millennia, unhindered by the sound of drums and the relentless, unceasing noise that had been the Time Lords seeking to save themselves from the end of the universe. Wonders how blissful it must have been to finally have peace, and then she frowns as she is reminded, against her will and for the thousandth time, that with the exorcising of the mental demon that had been the Time Lords’ signal, Missy’s actions had therefore been born of free will and her own volition. It’s a sobering thought, but as she walks she wonders how much of Missy had been forged in the men she had been before; how much of her intentionality and predisposition towards evil had been a learned behaviour, instilled in her by centuries of reinforcement.

It had been a tough habit to break, but the Doctor had managed it in the Vault; managed to make Missy repent; managed to draw from her tears of remorse and the realisation that she had been wrong to do the things she had done. It had been intoxicating to bring about that change; heady, to see her friend unencumbered by the desire to commit atrocities and instead experiencing the feelings that dogged the Doctor so relentlessly: regret, remorse and self-loathing. To see Missy feel them had been to feel them herself, and she’d left the Vault each night burdened with her own self-hatred and her own memories; remembering the faces of all the people she hadn’t been able to save and all the people who had died in her name. Her best friend’s redemption had been a viciously double-edged sword; as it had brought salvation to Missy, so it had brought suffering to the Doctor.

She supposes, she thinks to herself, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on the road, that she ought to feel a sense of gladness about Gallifrey’s end. After all, the Time Lords had been the ones who had tormented her best friend past the point of sanity; they had interfered in her own life countless times; they had exiled her; they had refused to save her best friend, who they had condemned to die for the sake of a half-understood prophecy.

At the thought of Clara, her mouth quirks into an involuntary smile. For what they had done to Clara – for their pursuit across time and space until she and Clara had stepped onto the fittingly-named Trap Street and her companion had met her death – the Time Lords had finally been punished suitably, in an ending that was far more final than the Doctor had managed to bring about for the general she had shot during their daring escape. _This_ was their punishment; this obliteration was, in part, their own fault for the sins and atrocities they had wrought upon the ones she loved. The thought is disingenuous and yet she can’t bring herself to regret it; the fact of the matter is that the things the Time Lords had done in the sake of furthering their own race had been appalling, twisted and wrong, and this is – in a perverse way – what they deserve. They had betrayed the Master’s trust in them and snuffed out Clara’s life for fear of an ancient prediction which was purely speculative; they had destroyed the lives of countless others the Doctor had loved, and with that thought, she stops where she is in the road, her gaze captured by a small, burnt-out homestead.

The Doctor remembers, as she looks at it, another part of the planet and another homestead; a humble home, but _her_ home, nonetheless. She remembers the sounds of her children playing in the fields; remembers the warm smile and embrace of her wife as she returned home from a long journey. Against her better judgement, she turns her feet towards the ruins of the cottage, running her fingers along the charred remains of the fence that had once protected the small farm from intruders, feeling it crumble to ash under her touch.

She remembers, as she circles the burnt-out remains of the house, how it had felt to have a family. How it had felt to have her hearts outside of her body, running around in the shape of her children. Tumbling, shoving, pushing, shouting, laughing, crying; their warm, soft forms, a chaos all of their own, and a force of nature to be reckoned with. She remembers with a sad smile how it had felt to hold them in her arms, from the times that they were newly-formed and perfect to the times that they were too old for such embraces, and wriggled and squirmed away from her, embarrassed by her touch. She remembers holding her son in her arms, no longer a boy but a man, and off to fight in the Time War. Remembers how it had felt when the message from his commander had arrived, and her wife had fallen apart; remembers the guilt and the pressing need to get away from it all, and the decision to go to war and take his place; her own form of penitence.

As she pushes open the scorched, barely-intact front door, she’s assailed by the memory she fights each day to forget – or not forget, not exactly; but push to the back of her mind, lest it overwhelm her and render her mute with the weight of grief that she still shoulders.

_She’s been aboard battle TARDISes and star destroyers for so long that to walk on the soil of her home planet has rendered her, at first, a little unsteady. That’s not the only thing; around her, the familiar landscape is dotted with the ugly, jarring scars of the war; burnt-out farms, destroyed cottages; large, ugly gun emplacements aimed at the sky, which is bright and clear. She’d thought this place safe, when she’d left to fight; thought that such a small, remote settlement would be safe from the Dalek assault, and safe from harm._

_As she climbs the hill that conceals her home from view of the village, she feels her hearts soar in anticipation; thinks of her wife and the little ones; thinks of her own bed and home-cooked food and warm embraces. And then she reaches the peak of the ridge and the bottom drops out of her world as she looks down into the familiar dell; takes in the sight of the burnt-out cottage and the scorched earth surrounding it. She half-runs, half-falls down the slope towards it, taking in the ugly blackness of the charred earth; the crumbling walls, no longer smoking; the shattered windows._

_She pushes open the front door with apprehension, hardly daring to hope. At first glance, the kitchen appears empty, but then a flash of something bright catches her eye – a scrap of metal she had twisted with her own hands into a toy for her youngest son. She crouches and reaches for it, and it’s then that she sees them, huddled under the disintegrating remains of the kitchen table. The bodies of her wife and children, fruitlessly seeking shelter, her wife’s face upturned as though seeking out her husband in his ship far above them, praying he might hear their call._

On the floor of _this_ farmhouse lays a single toy spaceship, the paint blistered and bubbled by the heat of the inferno. That’s enough to send her back outside; she has seen enough cremated children to last her a lifetime, and she sinks to the ground on her knees, the embers staining her coat a burnt orangey-black, marking her with the death of her planet.

She feels guilty now for her earlier thoughts; remorse that she’d felt the Time Lords deserved this. Perhaps those in command had; perhaps those who had sent her – and countless others – to war; those who’d driven the Master insane; those who had come for her and Clara. But these people, the ordinary people; for them to have died seems atrocious, wasteful, senseless; for children to have perished in their beds, for the sake of… what? The Master’s second catharsis? His bitterness, his anger, his… lashing out? He had never been so mindlessly genocidal; had never directed his anger towards children. The Doctor can still remember their children playing together; still remembers the rituals they had completed together to welcome a new baby into their families. For him to turn on such innocence and youth; for him to wipe out their people with such indiscriminate fury, is loathsome. There is nothing that they could have done to deserve this; nothing that might justify the murder of children.

She’s sick then, and the sensation is strange to her; it’s the first time in her new body, and something about that thought makes her sick again; that she might have a new body, but these people – _her_ people – would never regenerate again. Her entire planet brought to its knees; her entire race wiped out. And why? At the whim of a man who is still emotionally little more than a child himself; a man who had lashed out and murdered two point four seven billion people in his moment of rage.

Is that figure even still accurate? She feels a pang of guilt; wonders about counting the bodies, but the thought of having to peel back charred blankets and look into the agonised faces of the deceased is inherently abhorrent to her. She wonders if she might be able to set the TARDIS to scan; wonders whether it could make sense of what had once been wood or stone or glass or metal or Time Lord. It would be worth a try, she supposes; something to hold the Master more directly accountable for, and something to enshrine in some kind of memorial.

Getting to her feet, streaked in the ashes of her planet, she begins to trek numbly back to the TARDIS, her hands clenched at her sides. With her, each step of the way, the ghosts of children dance with her, mirroring her every stride and dancing in and out of her legs, singing the old songs of their people, their robes fluttering in a non-existent breeze. She can almost see them, and as she reaches the TARDIS, she looks down at where they seem to be stood, expectantly, as though waiting for her to act.

The Doctor. The Oncoming Storm. The Destroyer of Worlds.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, her voice breaking. “I really am.”


End file.
